A service that chased the data brokers so you didn't have to - and a crash course in why that fight is so hard to win.

A powerful right that's miserable to use

Under GDPR and CCPA, you have a genuinely powerful right: you can tell any company holding your personal data to erase it, and they're legally obliged to comply. The catch is that exercising that right is miserable. There are hundreds of data brokers and email-finder platforms quietly trading your details, each with its own form, its own foot-dragging, its own way of never quite getting around to it. Almost nobody has the time, the patience, or the legal vocabulary to chase them all. DeleteMyEmail.com was built to do it for you.

One signature, then we did the chasing

The idea was simple. You sign up, you sign one Letter of Authority, and from then on the service does the chasing. It would fire off a properly worded erasure request to each broker, then, if they went quiet (as they so often did), follow up automatically a week apart, escalating in tone each time, right up to a final notice that mentioned the possibility of an ICO complaint. It covered a catalogue of more than sixty of the worst offenders: Hunter.io, Apollo.io, Clearbit, RocketReach, Lusha and the rest of the people-finder crowd. And it had a neat two-sided twist I was quite pleased with: the brokers themselves got their own little portal, where they could see every request waiting for them and mark them done, rather than drowning in one-off emails. Make the right thing the easy thing, for both sides.

So I ran the fight myself

Here's what makes this one worth telling, though. To build it properly, I had to run the fight myself, by hand, against real companies - and that's where it got interesting. I filed subject-access and erasure requests with Monster, Glassdoor, StepStone, Gumtree, even the DWP, and took a complaint all the way to the ICO. The things I learned were the kind you only get from the trenches.

Monster's first response to a deletion request was to assume I wanted to sell them something: "it appears you are seeking to form a business relationship."

The single biggest obstacle, which the ICO itself flagged, was verification: how does a broker know I'm really acting on someone's behalf? And the most sobering lesson of all came when I wrote back to the ICO months later and admitted that, as far as I could tell, not one of the complaints filed through the system had actually been actioned.

Where the right runs out

That's the honest reason DeleteMyEmail.com is dormant rather than thriving. The technology worked. The law was on our side. But the enforcement behind that law simply wasn't. The brokers had little real reason to comply quickly, and a small service couldn't manufacture the consequences that would make them. It turns out the hard part of data deletion was never the software. It was that the right exists on paper far more firmly than it does in practice.

Why I'm still glad I built it

I still think it's one of the more important things I've built, precisely because of what it exposed. It came from the same conviction that runs through people.io and FORTYEIGHT.ai - that people should have real control over their data, not just theoretical control - and it taught me, in the most concrete way possible, exactly how wide the gap between those two still is.

#ccpa

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DeleteMyEmail.com - the fight for your right to be forgotten